An in-depth report into the production of Cyberpunk 2077 has revealed that CD Projekt Red staff knew the extent of the issues that were present in the game before launch.
In the report from Bloomberg’s Jason Schreier, employees have gone on record to counter the claims made in a recent video released by studio co-founder Marcin Iwiński, who said that the scale of the bugs was not entirely known before release.
Schreier interviewed “more than 20 current and former CD Projekt staff” for the report, who talked about the issues with the development process, which describes a development process ” marred by unchecked ambition, poor planning and technical shortcomings”
– Last year, when CDPR explained that it shares 10% of profits with staff, gamers and pundits assumed the devs would get rich. Adrian Jakubiak said he made around $400/month when he started as a tester in 2015. In 2018, as a junior programmer, he said he was making ~$700/month
— Jason Schreier (@jasonschreier) January 16, 2021
Adrian Jakubiak, a former audio programmer said that the Cyberpunk 2077 was a more challenging project than The Witcher 3, but that the company expected to “figure it out along the way”.
Before release, much had been written about the nature of crunch around the development process of the game. Schreier reports that “over a dozen workers felt pressured to put in the extra hours by their managers and co-workers”
In conclusion: Cyberpunk was announced eight years ago, but development didn't really start until 2016. In 2018, they had little but a (mostly) fake demo. Most of the staff knew and openly said it wouldn't be ready for release in 2020. But management believed in CD Projekt Magic
— Jason Schreier (@jasonschreier) January 16, 2021
Jakubiak himself says “There were times when I would crunch up to 13 hours a day — a little bit over that was my record probably — and I would do five days a week working like that”
Schreier goes on to cover the E3 2018 demo of Cyberpunk 2077, which provided a vertical slice of gampleay that impressed fans and journalists alike. Developers explained to Schreier that it was “almost entirely fake” and that “CD Projekt hadn’t yet finalized and coded the underlying gameplay systems, which is why so many features, such as car ambushes, were missing from the final product.”
Some tidbits that were cut from the piece:
– Veteran devs from other companies were shocked at CDPR's free-for-all production. One example: if someone needed a shader, they'd make it, with no pipeline in place to determine whether someone had already made one w/ the same function— Jason Schreier (@jasonschreier) January 16, 2021
The report also covers the fact that despite being announced in 2021, development on Cyberpunk 2077 didn’t start until late 2016, and that “The overtime didn’t make development of the game any faster.” and that on confirmation of release on April 16, 2020 – later delayed multiple times – one contact said they thought the release date was “a joke” as the team expected the game to be ready by 2022.
Late last month, a CDPR investor filed a class-action lawsuit against the Polish developer for its misleading representation of the game’s state to shareholders and the public.
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